"for everyone who has seen their life in ruins, and found the courage to dream regardless of it"

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I’ve blogged about most of that first year after my SA and what it was for me, in a way.

But before I move on to the second year, there are few more things to mention.

Oh, and for those of you new here who are new to the story, if you scroll over “Story and Background” you can choose time period, and then go backwards in it to see what I’ve written. I’ll soon add few pages with chronologically linked posts for easier access. I’m also possibly writing a memoir book/guideline for those going through rape recovery. I’ve learned some things on the way of getting here, and although I am not an expert, there are things I learned in the past year that I wish someone had told me when I was first struggling with this. Anyway, that book is in the process of making, and meanwhile, there are few more things I would like to share.

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1. Counseling

I’ve mentioned in a previous post, that counseling somehow helped me, even though I told the counselor very little. One thing that struck me though- and that I tried to conceal from her, because I thought it made me a freak or crazy- was my inability to separate how I feel.

She started asking me things about how I feel.

I remember I mastered some answer, even though I knew that at best I’m twisting the truth.

But she kept asking me how I feel, and what was I supposed to say?

I was spending most of my time at my favorite university, with my friends, completely miserable? And despite that most of the time I am not sure how I feel? I can’t make difference between good, bad, sad, angry? Everything had somehow blended together and it wasn’t that I was running from how I felt. I had no clue how I felt. None. I ran her question through my head many times after that, for myself, and found it disturbing that I still didn’t feel in way. There was no separation of feelings within me anymore. I was an emotional time-bomb waiting to explode.

2. Fragments and concentration

Now, that is the other thing about my first year that I’d like to share. Mostly because while going through it I constantly wondered if I’m going crazy or have somehow broken my brain beyond repair.Only now, getting out of it, I can see how it was, and that it wasn’t forever. I wish I’d known that what I was going through was perfectly fine considering. Continue reading →

More particularly, I’ve worked on overcoming my issue with rape. The summer when it happens, my whole universe snaps out of it’s axis, and the world changes for me. I know somewhere deep in me, life as I know it is over.

Now, it all sounds almost bearable. For more than half year, I have given everything I had to make it bearable, at first so deep in depression that it was hard to make myself get out of bed, let alone do anything else.
Finally, I am able to work nicely, to get up in the morning without feeling like I’ll break to pieces if I go outside, and to see my friends, without constantly having the feeling I’m living 2 lives at the same time.

When I first begin recovery, I’m touchy on everything around the issue. Pronouncing the word rape for a first time after the fact happens only after I have cried in a bathroom for 5 hours. And somehow, now that I’ve almost resolved that, I discover I’m almost as touchy on the subject of money.Continue reading →

“Right now, you aren’t making difference between fantasy and reality.” I look at the counselor, not so convinced.

The reality of what happened, it’s engraved in my memory, in every scar on my skin, in every night I wake from nightmares. What does she know?

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That was 2 years ago, when I went to a counselor, to get help so that I wouldn’t want to drink all the time anymore. It helped, even though I never told her that the main reason that I want to drink is the broken memories I had of my rape, and trying to move on as if it never happened.

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People are learned constantly that we need roots. Familiar things. That in a hard situation you have to try to contain your life in normal routine. When we get into a situation which is hard but we have no control over, we hold onto what we know, until the storm passes.

So this has been my least successful and most successful week so far. I pushed myself a little too much and blocked myself from doing more…but at the same time did some work that has been long time coming, work I have been avoiding …well, since I started recovering.

Problem Solving

After I admit to a friend the biggest thing I can’t solve and blame myself for now, I feel waves of guilt and shame and reliefsplashing through me. To my best of an effort I can’t understand how I have turned things around to think that not dealing with problems is helping me function. Although in all fairness, dealing with all I was dealing then, I really didn’t have energy for much more. So now I’m trying. Slower than I would wish for, but it’s better than nothing.

And then it hits me.

My God, how have I twisted my world since that summer. I couldn’t think straight, I was so hurt, why did I think making life-altering decisions then was at all good idea? Continue reading →

It all begins 5 months ago, which was exactly about 2 years after my SA.

There is no problem. I have no problem. Nothing really big happened that summer. I’m completely fine all the time. I mean minus the nightmares, not-sleeping, not-eating and feeling everything is completely pointless.

That first week back from working as an intern at a festival at the sea, I know something is changing in me. There is part of me that has enjoyed immensely the sea, the new people and memories, and that wants to save the experience and try to build from it. But there is the other part of me. The part I have pushed down for way too long. That festival, it has pushed me to the limit, and I can’t continue to deny what I have for 2 years.

I can’t, but I have to. The free week I have until I’m back at work is enough to get myself together, or so I say to myself.

Tough love baby! I just gotta make it through few more weeks of work.

I’ve made it 2 years, swimmingly, this is a baby job, I can do it in my sleep.

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That one week I circle the apartment like a ghost. I don’t call my best friend, or my other friends, they don’t even know I’m back yet. I go out to buy food, I skype with my partner who is then back at his city. I sleep and circle the apartment like a ghost, trying to get myself ready for the coming week.

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QUOTES from a random post:

" So, I watched TV series instead. Because they were convenient, and colorful, and different, and because they covered that faceless, bottomless emptiness left after that guy had taken all he wanted from my body, and after I had thrown away all that he left of my soul."
---"Coping Mechanisms: TV addictions and Other Disasters", The Road to Recovery